Author: Paul Haven
Publication: The Asian Age
Date: September 21, 2004
It started with a robbery, but the
gang that burst into a branch of Al-Habib bank in this teeming port city
had no interest in striking it rich, and the university graduate driving
the getaway car was just getting started on a master plan for terror.
The heist, carried out in daylight
and with AK-47 assault rifles, is emblematic of a new brand of Islamic
militant - more educated but less established and largely cut off from
traditional sources of terror funding, Pakistani police and intelligence
officials told the Associated Press.
Atta-ur Rehman and his Jundullah
gang walked away from the bank in Karachi on November 18 with just under
4 million rupees, enough to finance an eight-month wave of attacks against
the US consulate, a Christian bible studies group, a peace concert by an
Indian singer, a police station, and a senior Pakistani military general.
At least 17 people died in the assaults,
all carried out in the urban sprawl of Karachi, a city of 15 million that's
honeycombed with terror hideouts and Al-Qaida safehouses. There's no indication
Al Qaeda had a hand in Jundullah's spree, but some gang members are believed
to have spent time at training camps with top members of Osama bin Laden's
network. "Normally, when robbers loot a bank they split the cash and go
their separate ways, but the Jundullah gang only spent a bout 500,000 rupees
from their heist and they stuck together," said Fayyaz Leghari, chief of
operations for the Karachi police. "They were not ordinary robbers. They
saw the bank job as a way to fund their holy mission."
Mr Leghari said the police recovered
the rest of the money when they arrested 10 members of the gang following
a June 10 assassination attempt on Ahsan Saleem Hayat, the city's military
commander and a close aide to President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Mr Hayat
survived but 11 others were killed. The group, whose name means Allah's
Brigade, was apparently saving the cash to finance more attacks.
"They have a record of each penny
spent, all of it they believe in a noble cause, and they are not denying
what they have done," said another police investigator involved in the
interrogations of Jundullah suspects, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The police and intelligence officials
believe there are about a half dozen other militant bands operating in
Karachi, each with about 15 to 20 members. In addition to Jundullah, officials
say they are aware of two cells that call themselves Khuddam Uddin, meaning
servants of the religion, and Al Furqan - "The Distinguisher." Other group
names aren't known.
Most of the new groups are offshoots
of Al Qaeda-linked Sunni sectarian organisations like Lashkhar-e-Jhangvi
and Sipah-e-Sihaba, which have killed hundreds of Shia Muslims, or Kashmiri
militant organisations like Jaish-e-Mohammed and Harakat-ul-Mujahideen.
They're motivated by centuries-old Shia-Sunni feuding, and more recent
anger over the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Unlike their parent
organisations with well-established networks for raising money - from Arab
sympathisers, Al Qaeda, and jihadi-linked charities - the smaller groups
have improvised.
Robberies, drug trafficking and
other crimes have long been used by militant groups across the globe -
such as the abduction of heiress Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation
Army in 1975 - but an increased reliance on them in Pakistan may be a sign
that Washington's push to shut terrorists off from their financing is having
an effect. Jameel Yusuf, the former head of a civilian-police counter-terrorism
task force who now runs a private firm dedicated to fighting carjackings,
said there have been several other suspicious robberies in the province
linked to militant groups. He said a truck filled with tens of thousands
of dollars worth of tobacco was hijacked in October 2003 and found outside
a mosque known as a haven for militants. In August, thieves made away with
thousands of dollars from an electronics market in another suspicious case.
A police official said authorities were also looking into a militant link
to a recent hold-up at a Karachi moneychangers office.
"It's a totally new phenomenon,"
Mr Yusuf said. Pakistani news reports have said the new groups are working
together, and have formed a leadership committee called Brigade 313. Mr
Leghari, however, said authorities have seen no evidence of such coordination.
The new groups are much smaller than the militant groups authorities dealt
with in the past. "That means that if you arrest one guy, he might lead
you to one or two others, but that's it," said a senior police official,
who also spoke on condition of anonymity. Most of the militants that comprise
the new groups trained at Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan as guests of the
former Taliban regime, which was then an ally of Pakistan. They are motivated
by a hatred for the United States and for Gen. Musharraf, who they see
as abandoning their cause following the September 11, 2001 terror attacks
in the United States.
"We nurtured them for years, and
then the government did a U-turn," said one senior Karachi police official.
"If you adopt a son and then you throw him out when he is 23 years old,
of course he is going to be angry." He spoke on condition he not be further
identified. Gen. Musharraf survived two assassination attempts in December,
and his choice for Prime Minister, Shaukat Aziz, was nearly blown up in
July.
Security ties to the militants may
not be entirely broken. Several Army officers have been detained in the
attacks on Gen. Musharraf, and the police and intelligence sources say
an Army major and several other officials are being interrogated on suspicion
they helped Jundullah carry out the attack on the Karachi general. The
government has not confirmed any such arrests. Authorities say the fledgling
militant groups are gaining in sophistication, aided by highly educated,
deeply committed leaders. Ur-Rehman, who personally participated in the
bank heist and several carjackings, has a master's degree in statistics
from the university of Karachi. Other group members were also university
graduates, and two doctors have been arrested for alleged links to the
group and for treating alleged terrorists. In addition, Pakistani authorities
in June arrested a Karachi computer expert, Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, on
suspicion of links with thousands of Al Qaeda terrorists worldwide. That
arrest helped lead to the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian
with a $5 million US bounty on his head for his role in the 1998 bombings
of US embassies in East Africa.
"You can recruit an illiterate man
to do a suicide bombing," Mr Yusuf explained. "But you need an educated
man to lead him." (AP)
